It’s an honor to speak with you about Marc today, and I would like to thank Lillian, Anne, and Catherine for asking me to do so.^[1] I knew Marc as a teacher and mentor during my graduate study at Columbia in the 1960s. Since then, over almost forty years, he has been a close friend and abiding presence in my life. For me, as for many others, his work and the very example of his life have been a source of ongoing inspiration.
My relationship with Marc began, in a way, before I ever met him. During the spring of my senior year in college, the Graduate School at Columbia wrote me that I had been accepted into the graduate program in history. I went to share this information with Larry Silverman, the Russian historian who was my undergraduate advisor. Larry was a Harvard graduate, and throughout my senior year he had spoken with me almost exclusively about Harvard. So I was a bit surprised at how delighted he was at this news from Columbia. Being admitted at Columbia was great, he said, because Marc Raeff was there. Here I recall his emphatic statement that Marc was not only a gifted historian, but a great person. Knowing Marc during the coming years only served to confirm the wisdom of Larry’s judgment about him.
At Columbia, I first encountered Marc when I was a student in his lecture course on Imperial Russia. I was initially struck by the simplicity of the course’s reading list, which asked students to read English translations of Russian literary classics from Pushkin to Chekhov. It’s possible I would have read most of this literature at some point anyway, but Marc’s course gave me not just a license but a mandate to do so. I’m not sure whether Marc had any concrete goal here beyond his conviction that one had to know this literature in order to join the conversation about Russian history. Whatever his intention, this reading combined with Marc’s lectures to intensify my interest in Russian history and culture at the very beginning of my graduate studies.
During my second year of graduate study I enrolled in two of Marc’s seminars: the first on institutional reforms and the second on Russian intellectual history. The syllabi for these courses were once again spare, consisting of the assigned readings for our class meetings. But this list of readings was considerably more imposing. The weekly assignments called upon us to read several hundred pages of legislation, memoirs, or other primary sources. These sources, of course, were in Russian. Finally, often there were only two copies of the book to be had in the city of New York, one at Columbia and the other at the New York Public Library. There were sixteen students in the class, as I recall, so the question of how all of us could possibly do the reading posed a problem.
Marc didn’t regard these assignments as in any way unusual, so we all scrambled to read as much as we could. But the assignments made the following point clearly (in my words): “Ladies and gentleman, these are the sources that historians of Russia work with. They are written in a Russian that may be difficult for you, but your reading will improve with time and effort. If this is not what you had in mind, then perhaps you should do something else. This is what we do.” I’m certain this little speech never crossed Marc’s mind, but this was the impact that his expectations had upon those of us in the class. Given the challenge, as I recall, every student in the class achieved things that would have seemed impossible before.

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I don’t intend for my remarks today to focus exclusively or even primarily upon Marc’s work as a historian, but it is impossible to think about him without meditating upon both his scholarly legacy and the way in which his work as a historian fit into the broader framework of his life.
Over the course of his career, Marc produced a steady stream of scholarly books and articles as well as collections of source materials. He wrote with authority and insight on subjects ranging from medieval Russia to the twentieth century. His particular concern was to illuminate the arc of Imperial Russian history, gauging the reforms of Peter the Great and their antecedents and the political and cultural environment in which they occurred. He did pioneering work in assessing the ways in which Peter’s reforms and program of Westernization affected the daily lives, mentality, and intellectual horizons of the Russian nobility as well as Russian society over the course of the next two centuries.
Marc was intensely interested in comparative history. Not all historians have the linguistic skills and overall cultural mastery to write such comparative history well, but Marc certainly did. He always thought in comparative terms and fought as best as he could against the insularity that characterized so much of the historical writing about Russia. This comparative dimension is prominent in all of his writing on Russian themes. Such a comparative approach is at the heart of his remarkable study of the role of law and institutions in seventeenth-century Germany and Russia.
Marc’s study of the cultural contributions of the Russian emigration, which he undertook late in his career, was an intellectual departure that was far more daring than it seems today. Certainly it took him outside the conventional boundaries of what Russian historians were doing, and few of us understood just how fruitful this inquiry would be. As was so often the case, he proved to be ahead of his time, anticipating the interest in the emigration that would arise inside Russia itself in the 1980s and 1990s as well as what we now call transnational history. Marc was not one to base his scholarly writing on his own memory or personal experience, but his study of the emigration brought him back to his own roots. His understanding of the dilemmas that the Russian emigration confronted drew upon his own childhood as a Russian émigré first in Germany, and later in Paris.
Marc also felt keenly the responsibility to write not simply for a narrow circle of specialists, but for the broader scholarly and general public. He was not a popularizer, but he became a real master at presenting historical arguments to a broader educated audience in clear and even elegant language. His French lectures, later translated into English as Understanding Imperial Russia, are a particularly good example of this. Deceptively simple in its presentation, this volume continues to have a lot to say to scholars as well as a broader readership.
Marc had a gift for framing his questions well and placing them in a clear historical context. He wrote in a prose that was clear, unpretentious, and to the point. He tended to regard all conventional truths about a period with a skeptical eye, wondering whether we shouldn’t be posing our questions in a different way. His point of departure was always to enrich the discussion by writing something original that was both true and suggestive to others.
The elegance of Marc’s language could disguise the unusually adept balance that is embodied in so many of his historical judgments. The extent of his achievement in this regard becomes much more impressive when you are working in primary sources close to the ones that he used. Having plumbed those sources and struggled to arrive at a set of insights that might be new, you often find in rereading Marc’s work that he was there before you. The sentences that you skimmed over in his work turn out to contain precisely the breadth, nuance, and clarity that you had hoped to achieve yourself. I know more than one colleague who has found this to be the case.

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Marc cultivated and enjoyed an enormous circle of friends: people for whom he cared a lot and who in turn prized him in every way. He nurtured these friendships in a sustained fashion that took many forms. His letters and his fondness for communicating through letters seemed almost part of an earlier century, just as the speed with which he responded to letters was legendary. Everyone here knows what those letters were like: warm greetings, responses to whatever had been in your most recent letter, comments on your concerns, whether professional or family, but also reflections on some book he was reading, some intellectual trend he had noticed, or some aspect of current events. In short, what you got was a letter, not a message. It gave you something to ponder, and invited your response.
But letters were by no means the only way in which Marc reached out to friends. Rather he and Lillian together were tireless and gifted hosts at their home in Tenafly. They shared the tasks of planning the meal, shopping, and preparing the food, and they took pride in providing their guests with really extraordinary meals. I remember Marc’s preparation of okroshka, a Russian soup normally made with kvas. No kvas was available here at the time, so he substituted 7UP, and this bit of cultural substitution worked perfectly. On another occasion Marc and Lillian served artichokes as an appetizer. I don’t think I had ever seen an artichoke before; certainly I had no idea how to go about eating one. Marc sensed this right away, so the education that he gave me included how to peel and enjoy an artichoke.
Marc was generous with his friends, but no less generous in reaching out to help people he didn’t know well: one person asking for comments on an article, another seeking advice about where to publish something, a third had a project with which he needed help, a fourth requesting him to write the introduction to a book. On more than one occasion there were individuals whom he did not know well personally who found themselves in situations of genuine distress. Here Marc eagerly reached out to help them. His generosity here went beyond putting in a good word for someone, although his recommendation alone could make a real difference in someone’s life. More often such help also included the hand of friendship. His empathy and active concern made a real difference in the lives of many.

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I always thought of Marc as quintessentially American, and in many ways he was. I knew that he had been born in Russia and raised in Europe, but initially it was this American dimension of his identity that was easiest for me to recognize. Later, it became obvious that he retained a good measure of Russian identity throughout his life. I could see this more clearly when he spoke of his mother, or when I met his aunt in Moscow or his cousin Natasha here, or finally in the stories he told about his experiences in the Russian emigration. It was also evident in the active role he played in supporting and writing for the Novyi zhurnal.
But he had French and German identities that derived not only from his childhood and early youth in those countries but also from a lifelong attachment to friends and scholars there and a definite attachment to the cultures of those countries. Like many Europeans, at least of an earlier generation, Marc carried a huge body of poetry around in his head. Sometimes, at a particular juncture, he would quote a Russian line, often a stock phrase from Gore ot uma that he would utter with a laugh. But in my experience he was no less at home in French poetry, possibly the legacy of a lycée education. All of these things were part of Marc’s overall identity as a citizen, literally, of the world, which fit well with his natural attraction to Enlightenment traditions such as rationality in argument, a reliance upon empirical evidence, and a dispassionate attitude in discussing complex and potentially explosive questions.

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Marc wore his learning lightly, and his scholarly life – it seems to me – was inseparable from his larger curiosity about the world and his effort to achieve a deeper understanding of the overall human condition. This larger quest, in turn, was embedded in his devotion to his family, his participation in his university and community, and his loyalty to his friends. In this sense he was anything but a scholar removed from the currents and concerns of everyday life. If he maintained a noticeable equanimity in the way he lived his life, it derived from his commitment almost literally to cultivate his own garden: to read, think, write, communicate, keep up with friends, stay close to family, and carve out whatever civilized life one could in the days we are given. The ability to live a life in this fashion is not unique, of course, but it is not given to everyone.
I remember Marc best in the many visits I made to his house over the years. When I think of him now, I tend to recall him at one of three places in the house. In the first, he’s sitting in a reading chair in his living room. At his right hand there is a wall of shelves that he built, and the shelves house the better part of the literary legacy of Europe as well as Russia. The writer whose works are closest to that reading chair is Alexander Pushkin. He wasn’t Marc’s exclusive inspiration, but Marc didn’t shelve books randomly. The second place I see Marc is in his upstairs study. Here there is a reading chair opposite his desk. Here, inches from his right hand, he had placed the works of Vasily Kliuchevsky, whose vision of Russia’s historical development he both appreciated and significantly revised.
Finally, in my mind’s eye I see Marc at the breakfast table in the sunroom just off of the family kitchen. We had a lot of conversations at this table, and thus this picture is one in which I hear his voice. Marc was a great partner in conversation. When he spoke, his learning and life experience blended together in almost weightless fashion. He was animated in his conversation, always engaged with his interlocutor, and his sense of humor was never far from the surface. Conversations gave you the illusion that you had been lifted to his plane of regard, to his vantage point in looking out upon the human experience. Having Marc as a mentor and friend was something I never took for granted. I will sorely miss him.